of money he had received and which were not his own, but that he had
received them for their use. By this time his intercourse with gentlemen
of the law became more considerable than it had been before. When first
attacked for presents, he never denied the receipt of them, or pretended
to say they were for public purposes; but upon looking more into the
covenants, and probably with better legal advice, he found that no money
could be legally received for his own use; but as these bribes were
directly given and received as for his own use, yet (says he) "there was
an inward destination of them in my own mind to your benefit, and to
your benefit have I applied them."
Now here is a new system of bribery, contrary to law, very ingenious in
the contrivance, but, I believe, as unlikely to produce its intended
effect upon the mind of man as any pretence that was ever used. Here Mr.
Hastings changes his ground. Before, he was accused as a peculator; he
did not deny the fact; he did not refund the money; he fought it off; he
stood upon the defensive, and used all the means in his power to prevent
the inquiry. That was the first era of his corruption,--a bold,
ferocious, plain, downright use of power. In the second, he is grown a
little more careful and guarded,--the effect of subtilty. He appears no
longer as a defendant; he holds himself up with a firm, dignified, and
erect countenance, and says, "I am not here any longer as a delinquent,
a receiver of bribes, to be punished for what I have done wrong, or at
least to suffer in my character for it. No: I am a great inventive
genius, who have gone out of all the ordinary roads of finance, have
made great discoveries in the unknown regions of that science, and have
for the first time established the corruption of the supreme magistrate
as a principle of resource for government."
There are crimes, undoubtedly, of great magnitude, naturally fitted to
create horror, and that loudly call for punishment, that have yet no
idea of _turpitude_ annexed to them; but unclean hands, bribery,
venality, and peculation are offences of turpitude, such as, in a
governor, at once debase the person and degrade the government itself,
making it not only _horrible_, but vile and contemptible in the eyes of
all mankind. In this humiliation and abjectness of guilt, he comes here
not as a criminal on his defence, but as a vast fertile genius who has
made astonishing discoveries in the art of government,--"_Dicam insigne,
recens, alio indictum ore_"--who, by his flaming zeal and the prolific
ardor and energy of his mind, has boldly dashed out of the common path,
and served his country by new and untrodden ways; and now he generously
communicates, for the benefit of all future governors and all future
governments, the grand arcanum of his long and toilsome researches. He
is the first, but, if we do not take good care, he will not be the last,
that has established the corruption of the supreme magistrate among the
settled resources of the state; and he leaves this principle as a
bountiful donation, as the richest deposit that ever was made in the
treasury of Bengal. He claims glory and renown from that by which every
other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and
disgraced. It has been said of an ambassador, that he is a person
employed to tell lies for the advantage of the court that sends him. His
is patriotic bribery, and public-spirited corruption. He is a peculator
for the good of his country. It has been said that private vices are
public benefits. He goes the full length of that position, and turns his
private peculation into a public good. This is what you are to thank him
for. You are to consider him as a great inventor upon this occasion. Mr.
Hastings improves on this principle. He is a robber in gross, and a
thief in detail,--he steals, he filches, he plunders, he oppresses, he
extorts,--all for the good of the dear East India Company,--all for the
advantage of his honored masters, the Proprietors,--all in gratitude to
the dear perfidious Court of Directors, who have been in a practice to
heap "insults on his person, slanders on his character, and indignities
on his station,--who never had the confidence in him that they had in
the meanest of his predecessors."
If you sanction this practice, if, after all you have exacted from the
people by your taxes and public imposts, you are to let loose your
servants upon them, to extort by bribery and peculation what they can
from them, for the purpose of applying it to the public service only
whenever they please, this shocking consequence will follow from it. If
your Governor is discovered in taking a bribe, he will say, "What is
that to you? mind your business; I intend it for the public service."
The man who dares to accuse him loses the favor of the Governor-General
and the India Company. They will say, "The Governor has been doing a
meritorious action, extorting bribes for our benefit, and you have the
impudence to think of prosecuting him." So that the moment the bribe is
detected, it is instantly turned into a merit: and we shall prove that
this is the case with Mr. Hastings, whenever a bribe has been
discovered.
I am now to inform your Lordships, that, when he made these great
discoveries to the Court of Directors, he never tells them who gave him
the money, upon what occasion he received it, by what hands, or to what
purposes he applied it.
When he can himself give no account of his motives, and even declares
that he cannot assign any cause, I am authorized and required to find
motives for him,--corrupt motives for a corrupt act. There is no one
capital act of his administration that did not strongly imply
corruption. When a man is known to be free from all imputation of taking
money, and it becomes an established part of his character, the errors
or even crimes of his administration ought to be, and are in general,
traced to other sources. You know it is a maxim. But once convict a man
of bribery in any instance, and once by direct evidence, and you are
furnished with a rule of irresistible presumption that every other
irregular act by which unlawful gain may arise is done upon the same
corrupt motive. _Semel malus præsumitur semper malus._ As for good acts
candor, charity, justice oblige me not to assign evil motives, unless
they serve some scandalous purpose or terminate in some manifest evil
end, so justice, reason, and common sense compel me to suppose that
wicked acts have been done upon motives correspondent to their nature:
otherwise I reverse all the principles of judgment which can guide the
human mind, and accept even the symptoms, the marks and criteria of
guilt, as presumptions of innocence. One that confounds good and evil is
an enemy to the good.
His conduct upon these occasions may be thought irrational. But, thank
God, guilt was never a rational thing: it distorts all the faculties of
the mind; it perverts them; it leaves a man no longer in the free use of
his reason; it puts him into confusion. He has recourse to such
miserable and absurd expedients for covering his guilt as all those who
are used to sit in the seat of judgment know have been the cause of
detection of half the villanies in the world. To argue that these could
not be his reasons, because they were not wise, sound, and substantial,
would be to suppose, what is not true, that bad men were always discreet
and able. But I can very well from the circumstances discover motives
which may affect a giddy, superficial, shattered, guilty, anxious,
restless mind, full of the weak resources of fraud, craft, and intrigue,
that might induce him to make these discoveries, and to make them in the
manner he has done. Not rational, and well-fitted for their purposes, I
am very ready to admit. For God forbid that guilt should ever leave a
man the free, undisturbed use of his faculties! For as guilt never rose
from a true use of our rational faculties, so it is very frequently
subversive of them. God forbid that prudence, the first of all the
virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be
employed in the service of any of the vices! No: it takes the lead, and
is never found where justice does not accompany it; and if ever it is
attempted to bring it into the service of the vices, it immediately
subverts their cause. It tends to their discovery, and, I hope and
trust, finally to their utter ruin and destruction.
In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts
he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and
contradictory. Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one
want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the
accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts
utterly irreconcilable with each other. He is asked, "How came you to
take bonds for this money, if it was not your own? How came you to
vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company's records, and to state
yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their
debtor?" His answer was, "I really cannot tell; I have forgot my
reasons; the distance of time is so great," (namely, a time of about two
years, or not so long,) "I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps
I had this motive, perhaps I had another," (but what is the most
curious,) "perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect." You
shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own
fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions. "For my
motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the
Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of
these sums and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own
account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the
Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,--namely, that I either chose
to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds
for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my
memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not think
it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. It will not be
expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my
intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time
that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I
attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied
in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a
strong probability, follow them."
My Lords, you see, as to any direct explanation, that he fairly gives it
up: he has used artifice and stratagem, which he knows will not do; and
at last attempts to cover the treachery of his conduct by the treachery
of his memory. Frequent applications were made to Mr. Hastings upon this
article from the Company,--gentle hints, _gemitus columbæ_,--rather,
little amorous complaints that he was not more open and communicative;
but all these gentle insinuations were never able to draw from him any
further account till he came to England. When he came here, he left not
only his memory, but all his notes and references, behind in India. When
in India the Company could get no account of them, because he himself
was not in England; and when he was in England, they could get no
account, because his papers were in India. He then sends over to Mr.
Larkins to give that account of his affairs which he was not able to
give himself. Observe, here is a man taking money privately, corruptly,
and which was to be sanctified by the future application of it, taking
false securities to cover it, and who, when called upon to tell whom he
got the money from, for what ends, and on what occasion, neither will
tell in India nor can tell in England, but sends for such an account as
he has thought proper to furnish.
I am now to bring before you an account of what I think much the most
serious part of the effects of his system of bribery, corruption, and
peculation. My Lords, I am to state to you the astonishing and almost
incredible means he made use of to lay all the country under
contribution, to bring the whole into such dejection as should put his
bribes out of the way of discovery. Such another example of boldness and
contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.
I have already shown, amongst the mass of his corruptions, that he let
the whole of the lands to farm to the banians; next, that he sold the
whole Mahomedan government of that country to a woman. This was bold
enough, one should think; but without entering into the circumstances of
the revenue change in 1772, I am to tell your Lordships that he had
appointed six Provincial Councils, each consisting of many members, who
had the ordinary administration of civil justice in that country, and
the whole business of the collection of the revenues.
These Provincial Councils accounted to the Governor-General and Council,
who in the revenue department had the whole management, control, and
regulation of the revenue. Mr. Hastings did in several papers to the
Court of Directors declare, that the establishment of these Provincial
Councils, which at first he stated only as experimental, had proved
useful in the experiment,--and on that use, and upon that experiment, he
had sent even the plan of an act of Parliament, to have it confirmed
with the last and most sacred authority of this country. The Court of
Directors desired, that, if he thought any other method more proper, he
would send it to them for their approbation.
Thus the whole face of the British government, the whole of its order
and constitution, remained from 1772 to 1781. He had got rid, some time
before this period, by death, of General Clavering, by death, of Colonel
Monson, and by vexation and persecution, and his consequent dereliction
of authority, he had shaken off Mr. Francis. The whole Council
consisting only of himself and Mr. Wheler, he, having the casting vote,
was in effect the whole Council; and if ever there was a time when
principle, decency, and decorum rendered it improper for him to do any
extraordinary acts without the sanction of the Court of Directors, that
was the time. Mr. Wheler was taken off,--despair perhaps rendering the
man, who had been in opposition futilely before, compliable. The man is
dead. He certainly did not oppose him; if he had, it would have been in
vain. But those very circumstances which rendered it atrocious in Mr.
Hastings to make any change induced him to make this. He thought that a
moment's time was not to be lost,--that other colleagues might come,
where he might be overpowered by a majority again, and not able to
pursue his corrupt plans. Therefore he was resolved,--your Lordships
will remark the whole of this most daring and systematic plan of bribery
and peculation,--he resolved to put it out of the power of his Council
in future to check or control him in any of his evil practices.
The first thing he did was to form an ostensible council at Calcutta for
the management of the revenues, which was not effectually bound, except
it thought fit, to make any reference to the Supreme Council. He
delegated to them--that is, to four covenanted servants--those functions
which by act of Parliament and the Company's orders were to be exercised
by the Council-General; he delegated to four gentlemen, creatures of his
own, his own powers, but he laid them out to good interest. It appears
odd that one of the first acts to a Governor-General, so jealous of his
power as he is known to be, as soon as he had all the power in his own
hands, should be to put all the revenues out of his own control. This
upon the first view is an extraordinary proceeding. His next step was,
without apprising the Court of Directors of his intention, or without
having given an idea of any such intention to his colleagues while
alive, either those who died in India, or those who afterwards returned
to Europe, in one day, in a moment, to annihilate the whole authority of
the Provincial Councils, and delegate the whole power to these four
gentlemen.
These four gentlemen had for their secretary an agent given them by Mr.
Hastings: a name that you will often hear of; a name at the sound of
which all India turns pale; the most wicked, the most atrocious, the
boldest, the most dexterous villain that ever the rank servitude of that
country has produced. My Lords, I am speaking with the most assured
freedom, because there never was a friend of Mr. Hastings, there never
was a foe of Mr. Hastings, there never was any human person, that ever
differed on this occasion, or expressed any other idea of Gunga Govind
Sing, the friend of Mr. Hastings, whom he intrusted with this important
post. But you shall hear, from the account given by themselves, what the
Council thought of their functions, of their efficiency for the charge,
and in whose hands that efficiency really was. I beg, hope, and trust,
that your Lordships will learn from the persons themselves who were
appointed to execute the office their opinion of the real execution of
it, in order that you may judge of the plan for which he destroyed the
whole English administration in India.
"The Committee must have a dewan, or executive officer, call him by what
name you please. This man, in fact, has all the revenue paid at the
Presidency at his disposal, and can, if he has any abilities, bring all
the renters under contribution. It is little advantage to restrain the
Committee themselves from bribery or corruption, when their executive
officer has the power of practising both undetected. To display the arts
employed by a native on such occasions would fill a volume. He discovers
the secret resources of the zemindars and renters, their enemies and
competitors; and by the engines of hope and fear, raised upon these
foundations, he can work them to his purpose. The Committee, with the
best intentions, best abilities, and steadiest application, must after
all be a tool in the hands of their dewan."
Your Lordships see what the opinion of the Council was of their own
constitution. You see for what it was made. You see for what purposes
the great revenue trust was taken from the Council-General, from the
supreme government. You see for what purposes the executive power was
destroyed. You have it from one of the gentlemen of this commission, at
first four in number, and afterwards five, who was the most active,
efficient member of it. You see it was made for the purpose of being a
tool in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; that integrity, ability, and
vigilance could avail nothing; that the whole country might be laid
under contribution by this man, and that he could thus practise bribery
with impunity. Thus your Lordships see the delegation of all the
authority of the country, above and below, is given by Mr. Hastings to
this Gunga Govind Sing. The screen, the veil, spread before this
transaction, is torn open by the very people themselves who are the
tools in it. They confess they can do nothing; they know they are
instruments in the hands of Gunga Govind Sing; and Mr. Hastings uses his
name and authority to make them such in the hands of the basest, the
wickedest, the corruptest, the most audacious and atrocious villain ever
heard of. It is to him all the English authority is sacrificed, and four
gentlemen are appointed to be his tools and instruments. Tools and
instruments for what? They themselves state, that, if he has the
inclination, he has the power and ability to lay the whole country under
contribution, that he enters into the most minute secrets of every
individual in it, gets into the bottom of their family affairs, and has
a power totally to subvert and destroy them; and we shall show upon that
head, that he well fulfilled the purposes for which he was appointed.
Did Mr. Hastings pretend to say that he destroyed the Provincial
Councils for their corruptness or insufficiency, when he dissolved them?
No: he says he has no objection to their competency, no charge to make
against their conduct, but that he has destroyed them for his new
arrangement. And what is his new arrangement? Gunga Govind Sing. Forty
English gentlemen were removed from their offices by that change. Mr.
Hastings did it, however, very economically; for all these gentlemen
were instantly put upon pensions, and consequently burdened the
establishment with a new charge. Well, but the new Council was formed
and constituted upon a very economical principle also. These five
gentlemen, you will have it in proof, with the necessary expenses of
their office, were a charge of 62,000_l._ a year upon the establishment.
But for great, eminent, capital services, 62,000_l._, though a much
larger sum than what was thought fit to be allowed for the members of
the Supreme Council itself, may be admitted. I will pass it. It shall be
granted to Mr. Hastings, that these pensions, though they created a new
burden on the establishment, were all well disposed, provided the
Council did their duty. But you have heard what they say themselves:
they are not there put to do any duty; they can do no duty; their
abilities, their integrity, avail them nothing; they are tools in the
hands of Gunga Govind Sing. Mr. Hastings, then, has loaded the revenue
with 62,000_l._ a year to make Gunga Govind Sing master of the kingdoms
of Bengal, Bahar, and Orissa. What must the thing to be moved be, when
the machinery, when the necessary tools, for Gunga Govind Sing have cost
62,000_l._ a year to the Company? There it is; it is not my
representation, not the representation of observant strangers, of good
and decent people, that understand the nature of that service, but the
opinion of the tools themselves.
Now did Mr. Hastings employ Gunga Govind Sing without a knowledge of his
character? His character was known to Mr. Hastings: it was recorded long
before, when he was turned out of another office. "During my long
residence," says he, "in this country, this is the first time I heard of
the character of Gunga Govind Sing being infamous. No information I have
received, though I have heard _many_ people speak ill of him, ever
pointed to any particular _act_ of infamy committed by Gunga Govind
Sing. I have no intimate knowledge of Gunga Govind Sing. What I
understand of his character has been from Europeans as well as natives."
After,--"He had many enemies at the time he was proposed to be employed
in the Company's service, and not _one advocate_ among the natives who
had immediate access to myself. I think, therefore, if his character had
been such as has been described, the knowledge of it could hardly have
failed to have been ascertained to me by the _specific_ facts. I have
heard him loaded, as I have many others, with general reproaches, but
have never heard any one express a doubt of _his abilities_." Now, if
anything in the world should induce you to put the whole trust of the
revenues of Bengal, both above and below, into the hands of a single
man, and to delegate to him the whole jurisdiction of the country, it
must be that he either was, or at least was reputed to be, a man of
integrity. Mr. Hastings does not pretend that he is reputed to be a man
of integrity. He knew that he was not able to contradict the charge
brought against him, and that he had been turned out of office by his
colleagues, for reasons assigned upon record, and approved by the
Directors, for malversation in office. He had, indeed, crept again into
the Calcutta Committee; and they were upon the point of turning him out
for malversation, when Mr. Hastings saved them the trouble by turning
out the whole Committee, consisting of a president and five members. So
that in all times, in all characters, in all places, he stood as a man
of a bad character and evil repute, though supposed to be a man of great
abilities.
My Lords, permit me for one moment to drop my representative character
here, and to speak to your Lordships only as a man of some experience in
the world, and conversant with the affairs of men and with the
characters of men.